Souk is free of this and its developers say there are no plans add any of GNOME Software’s capabilities. It has to be a distro package manager, an OS upgrader, a firmware updater, and a platform that plugins for other packaging formats can integrate neatly with. GNOME Software handles a great many things. In fact, it’s something of a weak link in an otherwise well-oiled chain. Souk is a slick front-end to install, remove, and manage Flatpak apps, not a GNOME Software replacementīut it’s fair to say that GNOME Software (or whatever you’re calling it) is an app with a bit of a bad reputation.īulky, bloated, and memory inefficient GNOME Software isn’t as nimble, as stylish, or as performant as the rest of the GNOME desktop.

GNOME Software (called ‘Ubuntu Software’ or ‘Snap Store’ in Ubuntu, depending on which About screen you look at) is the tool most of us turn to when we want to install Flatpak apps on our systems.

Souk is co-developed by Felix Häcker, the hands behind a slate of well-made, well-designed GTK apps available for Linux desktops including Shortwave and Fragments, and Christoper Davis, with design input from Tobias Bernard.īefore we look at what makes Souk so super let’s address the GNOME Software-shaped elephant in the room… Souk Independent Flatpak App Store It’s called Souk (a word meaning Arab bazaar or marketplace) and it’s built using GTK4 (due for release this month) and Rust (very popular programming language). A new store front for browsing Flatpak apps is in development and first impressions are good: it looks exactly like the kind of app many folks (myself included) have been clamouring for.

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